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Islam could be the communism of the 21st century if the West
does not reform its secular democracy, Australia's leading Catholic
has said in a speech in the United States.

Cardinal George Pell said secular liberal democracy was empty
and selfish, and Islam was emerging as an alternative world
view.

In a wide-ranging speech which also attacked his critics for
suggesting conservative Christians were a danger to democracy, Dr
Pell said communism had showed how the emptiness of the secular
approach could be filled with something darker.

"The small but growing conversion of native Westerners within
Western societies to Islam carries the suggestion that Islam may
provide in the 21st century the attraction which communism provided
in the 20th, both for those who are alienated or embittered on the
one hand, and for those who seek order or justice on the other," he
said.

Dr Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, told the Acton Institute for
the Study of Religion and Liberty last month that secular democracy
could not solve the rise of intolerant religion, but worsened
it.

He said democracy was not a good in itself. Its value depended
on the moral vision it served.

"The past century provided examples enough of how the emptiness
within secular democracy can be filled with darkness by political
substitutes for religion."

Dr Pell said the "democratic personalism" he advocated, based on
the dignity of the person, was the last alternative to secular
democracy available to the West.

He said for a Catholic bishop to speak this way inspired panic
and derision in those who had ideological convictions about
secularism. Their over-reaction was a bluff, an attempt to silence
opposition.

He asked: "Does democracy need a burgeoning billion-dollar
pornography industry to be truly democratic? Does it need an
abortion rate in the tens of millions?

"What would democracy look like if you took some of these things
out of the picture? Would it cease to be democracy? Or would it
actually become more democratic?"

Democratic personalism did not mean seizing power, he said, but
broadening the imagination.

"It is a work of persuasion and evangelisation, more than
political activism... It is also about salvation - not least of all
the salvation of democracy itself."